Attendees at a recent ISA conference on industrial wireless technology got plenty of exercise;

when about 130 paying attendees showed up—more than double the number that had initially been expected—ISA organizers had to find a bigger room at another hotel to accommodate the group, forcing attendees to walk back and forth between two hotels for alternating conference sessions and networking breaks.

The turnout at the July 23-24 event, sponsored by the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA, www.isa.org), in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is another indication of growing interest in wireless technology by industrial end-users. But judging by their comments—both from behind the podium and privately during networking breaks at the conference—many users are still taking a go-slow approach to the installation of wireless in their plants.

Tough sledding

Witness the presentation titled, “Cautiously Moving Forward with an Industrial Wireless Initiative in a Process Research and Development Facility.” The speaker, engineer James D. Murphy, from Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly and Co., said that when he earlier volunteered to speak, he expected that he would be an industrial wireless end-user by the time of the conference.

“But we’ve seen several delays, and I’m still a prospective user,” Murphy confessed to the group. While Lilly uses wireless technology in various locations within its facilities, he said, “wireless currently is not used in any manufacturing system.”

Despite having the go-ahead for an industrial wireless project from Lilly’s process control group, “communication with the company’s IT (information technology) infrastructure group has been tedious,” Murphy explained. His advice to other end-users considering a wireless manufacturing initiative: “Begin the dialog with IT governance organizations early. We did not anticipate [IT] concerns around bandwidth protection and security of the installed system.”

Potential conflicts between controls and IT groups is only one of several barriers that continue to hold back industrial wireless networking. Others frequently mentioned include questions about reliability and security, as well as a lack of industrial wireless standards.

Standards progress

On the standards front, conference attendees received the good word that progress is being made. The ISA’s SP100 wireless standards committee expects to have a draft version of ISA100.11a—the first of an anticipated “family” of ISA industrial wireless standards—ready for balloting by October, said Patrick Kinney, of Kinney Consulting, Export, Pa. Kinney is co-chair and chief editor for ISA100.11a.

ISA100.11a is expected to become an approved standard by next year’s first quarter, and initial wireless products based on the standard should be available during the second half of 2008, sources said. Release 1 of ISA100.11a will focus on supporting the process industry without excluding factory automation, said Kinney. Initially, only 2.4 Gigahertz (GHz) radios based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard will be included, for use in either star or mesh topologies. The Release 1 standard is designed for easy vendor interoperability, flexible and scalable security, and comprehensive coexistence with other wireless networks. It will tolerate latencies of about 100 milliseconds, making it suitable for monitoring and some open-loop control applications. Standards for systems supporting other applications, including closed-loop control, will come later.

Think it through

Conference presenters included representatives from various vendor companies, including keynote speakers from major process control suppliers Emerson
Process Management (www.emersonprocess.com), of Austin, Texas, and Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS, http://hpsweb.honeywell.com), based in Phoenix, both of which ar